Seattle has never lacked for rain, and The Night and The Dirty have bottled it. "Reflections" sounds like a downpour on a Pacific Northwest window at dusk, the kind that blurs the streetlights into smears of amber and sends a person back through the drawers of their own past. The band call their sound "Surf Drench", and for once the press release is on to something. It's surf music after the beach has emptied, the tide gone out, the sky the colour of wet slate and the only company a guitar still dripping from the sea.

Most of us were handed a set of beliefs before we were old enough to inspect them. Plenty of rock bands have written songs about the moment the inspection begins. Few have made it sound like an eviction notice served by the sky. "MOTHER", the debut single from Chicago's CHANNELS, does exactly that, and it is a thrilling first word from a band with plenty more to say.

Anxiety rarely sounds this thrilling. Komaframe, the solo alias of a Roman multi-instrumentalist who has so far kept to the shadows, has called his new single "Overthinking", and the title is a neat joke at the music's expense. The mind at 3 a.m. does not meander. It tailgates, flashes its lights and refuses to pull over. This is the sound of that, and I would be lying if I said I minded.

Memory is a poor archivist. It mislays the important things, hoards the trivial ones, and returns them to us at three in the morning, slightly rearranged and wholly irresistible. "rest assured," the third and final single from Skiptrace's forthcoming debut album, behaves much like that. It plays like a recollection you can't quite place, and by the time its nearly five minutes are up you are certain it mattered.

There's a particular kind of song that arrives not with a bang but with the quiet click of a door closing on something irretrievable, and "Deux Moitiés" is exactly that kind of song. Nairolf — the French-born, Ontario-transplanted multi-instrumentalist who has spent three albums quietly building a case for himself as one of the more thoughtful voices in the post-grunge diaspora — has done something genuinely disarming here: he's gone soft, and in doing so, gone deeper.

Loss, in pop music, gets treated two ways: wallowed in until it curdles into self-pity, or so heavily varnished with hope that the wound never gets shown at all. Starboard to Sunset, a Jersey Shore outfit steered by singer-songwriter Tom Damiano, split the difference with a maturity that belies how straightforwardly the song is built. "Without You Here" doesn't dress up loss as triumph, nor does it drown in it. It simply sits with the ache, and trusts the listener to recognise it.

Most songs about a mob let you watch from the hill. "Burn the Witch" hands you a place in the crowd. Your neighbour is being killed by common consent, you know her, and you do nothing. The scenario is barely dressed up, and its cruelty is that the song never tells you what you would have done. It only makes you notice how quickly you begin to work out an excuse.

Some bands spend twenty years chasing a sound. FROZENROOM have spent twenty years chasing a feeling, and on their seventh outing they finally catch it by the throat. A Rush of Life is not a comeback, not a rebrand, not a calculated pivot towards whatever algorithm currently governs the Swiss rock underground. It is simply three musicians who have grown up together deciding, at long last, to stop performing maturity and start living it.

There is a particular kind of English pleasure in watching a band take a decade to finish an album and somehow arrive at exactly the right moment. *This Monologue Conversation*, the third full-length from I Plead Irony, is not a record that was rushed to market to catch a trend. It is a record that outlasted a pandemic, a change of career, several thousand miles of separation, and — one suspects — more than a little bickering in rehearsal rooms, and emerged sounding entirely unbothered by any of it.

Two men, a basement in Cincinnati, and three decades of unfinished business. That's the raw material behind "Cyberstalking," the latest transmission from Rob Dreyer and Nick Viltrakis, who have apparently been quietly perfecting their telepathy since 1995 without bothering to tell anyone. This is a record built on trust rather than rehearsal, and it shows in the best possible way: loose-limbed, confident, occasionally reckless, never sloppy.